Alphabet Is Paying a Dividend While Selling $85 Billion of New Stock

Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG)(NASDAQ:GOOGL) will pay its next dividend on Sept. 14 -- $0.22 per share, a rate the company raised 5% in April. The payout works out to about $10.8 billion a year across about 12.2 billion shares.

In June, the same tech company sold about $50 billion of new stock in a single week.

Both moves are part of one capital story. Alphabet announced an $80 billion equity raise on June 1 to fund its artificial intelligence (AI) build-out, then upsized it to $84.75 billion at pricing a day later. Next to that, the dividend can look like a rounding error. I think it's better understood as a signal. But the signal only makes sense once you see how completely the direction of Alphabet's money has changed this year.

Image source: Getty Images.

The money now flows the other way

For years, Alphabet's financing was mostly money going out, with buybacks the biggest piece. The company spent $28.3 billion repurchasing its own shares in the first half of 2025 alone.

In the first half of 2026, it repurchased none -- zero, with $69.5 billion still authorized under the buyback program its board approved in April 2025.

Instead, money came in -- a lot of it. On June 4, Alphabet completed a public offering of Class A and Class C shares that raised $20.5 billion, alongside a $10 billion private placement to an affiliate of Berkshire Hathaway. A day later, it sold $19 billion of depositary shares built on a new 6.25% mandatory convertible preferred stock.

All told, that comes to $49.6 billion collected, net of fees, in one week. And an at-the-market program lets Alphabet sell up to $40 billion more of common stock over time. The company hadn't sold a share under it as of June 30, and it says those proceeds are mainly meant to cover taxes tied to employee stock grants.

The company also borrowed. Debt issuance brought in $56.2 billion in the first half of the year, including $20.3 billion of senior notes in the second quarter -- and in August, Alphabet sold another $25 billion of notes.

Alphabet said in its quarterly filing that the proceeds will go to general corporate purposes, including "capital expenditures to scale AI infrastructure and global compute."

A young dividend, gently raised

Alphabet paid its first dividend in June 2024, at $0.20 per share. The rate rose 5% to $0.21 last year, and 5% again to $0.22 this April. The increases are small and steady, and so far the rate has only gone up.

Still, at a 0.25% yield, income isn't the reason anyone owns the stock. And the payout is modest against every other line in Alphabet's budget. The June stock sales collected more than four and a half years of dividends in one week. Capital spending will run $195 billion to $205 billion this year, a range management raised in July. That makes a full year of dividends equal to less than three weeks of the build-out.

Worth noting, too: there's now a more expensive dividend ahead of the common one. The mandatory convertible preferred stock Alphabet sold in June pays 6.25% a year, about $1.2 billion annually, until the shares convert into common stock by May 2029.

Why sell stock at all?

Because even Alphabet's cash generation is running behind its ambitions. Revenue rose 24% year over year to $119.8 billion in the second quarter, and Google Cloud revenue grew 82% -- an acceleration the company called out.

The business isn't the problem.

The problem is the size of the bill. In the second quarter, Alphabet's capital expenditures exceeded the cash its operations produced.

Ultimately, the mix of funding sources says what the company believes. Alphabet stopped buying its stock, sold new shares instead, and agreed to pay 6.25% on the preferred -- all to keep about $200 billion a year of AI construction moving.

Why keep the dividend at all, then?

I think it's because a dividend is a promise, and a cheap one. A dividend, once started, is a commitment investors expect a company to keep, and markets tend to punish companies that cut one. By paying it, and nudging it higher each year, Alphabet's board is saying the build-out won't consume everything. In July, the board declared it again, right on schedule.

Shares trade near $347 as of this writing, and what the stock does from here has little to do with the payout. It comes down to the returns on roughly $200 billion a year of AI spending, and those returns can't be measured yet. For now, the notable fact is the direction of the money: shareholders aren't being paid by Alphabet this year so much as they are funding it.

Daniel Sparks and his clients have positions in Berkshire Hathaway. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet and Berkshire Hathaway. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.